Wimborne Town Centre

Wimborne is a historic market town in Dorset, England. It was facing a similar predicament to many settlements of its type across the UK. Like many old towns and villages across the country, Wimborne had built up and developed naturally over hundreds of years with no clear organisation or structure in place to guide it.

There are numerous alleyways and winding roads spread across the beautiful town – which means that while Wimborne gets significant tourism, visitors can find it difficult to navigate. With lots of historic and listed buildings, it was important that their wayfinding strategy fit the heritage and culture of the area.

Nonetheless, the town has a number of navigational challenges, with multiple bridges over multiple rivers and new developments being added on the periphery of the location. As well as this, while there’s a number of parking locations, it’s difficult for drivers to find them.

So, Wimborne needed a wayfinding system to overcome these challenges.

We started by conducting a wayfinding audit. This involved a number of stakeholder engagement activities, including workshops and one-to-one interviews with local businesses alongside digital surveys with local people across the town. We also completed a number of surveys to improve our understanding of the current routes available for pedestrians, cyclists and buses around Wimborne.

With the audit completed, we started work on formulating the wayfinding strategy. We investigated the existing signage Wimborne had in place, and noted that there were a number of heritage signs, as well as several traditional cast iron finger posts and plaques. We also discovered that there was an industrial estate, around a twenty-minute walk away from the town centre but nonetheless within the remit of the town’s boundaries.

Wimborne’s business improvement district wanted the wayfinding strategy to extend across both the town and industrial estate. It was important to us that no matter where you go in Wimborne navigation would stay clear and consistent. We had to ensure the signage we designed for this project fit firmly within best practice for wayfinding, but still stayed characteristic for the town.

Since it’s historic, Wimborne featured lots of stone work and traditional signage types. When it came to designing a new signage family, then, we sought to ensure continuity with this culture and history throughout. In this process, we had to liaise with English Heritage as well as the council’s conservation and planning teams to ensure that none of the signs’ locations or designs would distract from the town’s appearance. 

One thing we could accomplish though, is declutter much of the legacy signage and incorporate it into the new wayfinding system to ensure it stays effective and seamless. The next step was the creation of a wayfinding map that identified key points of interest, historical or otherwise. We designed it to be flexible, so it could be used for tourists, or to navigate the night or day economies. It could likewise be adapted not just to the signage family, but also to various other wayfinding aids in print or digital formats.

It was important that in accomplishing the brief, the wayfinding system we designed connected the two central economic hubs of the town – the centre and industrial estate. 

Both the signage and map are able to stay consistent across the whole location, but can also be adapted to highlight specific aspects. As such, tourists can engage with materials that emphasise sites of historical interest, rather than the industrial estate.

This project is still in process. We are currently preparing for its manufacture and installation, scheduled to take place in Q4 of 2023 and Q1 of 2024.